As a professor at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy National University, which George Soros has done a great deal to support, I can testify to his commitment to Ukraine. He has reduced the budget of his International Renaissance Foundation to $5 million a year, but after reorganization the leaner, meaner fund is actually doing more with less money and people. And I have no doubt he would increase his support if he had more faith in the way things were going here.
The point is that Ukraine has the same kind of “robber capitalism” he describes in Russia with a not entirely different cast of characters. Figures not all that different from Berezovsky (also no stranger here) are entrenched in Parliament and the presidential kitchen cabinet. The process has not gone so far as in Russia, and hope is far from lost, but the general direction of this country’s evolution since independence is disturbing. The best news since independence is the appointment of the Yushchenko government, which does not seem to be tied in with the oligarchs and is working with the IMF shopping list to do what this country needs in order to pay off its debts, not to mention becoming affluent. The West has begun to demand specific steps to limit the size and functions of government to a level that Ukraine can afford without strangling business, and that is good.
The problem is that for all his much vaunted credit of confidence, Premier Yushchenko really has no large domestic constituency favoring what needs to be done. Those with real influence are not interested in things like transparency of government decision-making, the same rules for everybody in the economy, or creating an open society. And I agree with those who say that the Prime Minister has but little time before his popularity runs out and everybody will be tempted to throw him to the dogs. His fate will depend on the West, because everyone knows this country will go bankrupt without the West’s support and understanding. We in Ukraine have a historic chance to start creating a system capable of being integrated into European structures, because the one that has evolved, Russian-style, is incapable of such integration in terms of the very way it operates. It will either have to be changed or a process of “shadow integration” with a system it is compatible with, Russia’s, will be inevitable. I do not want to have to write, say, five years from now an article with the title “Who Lost Ukraine?”
